


i do not ask for any crown

by Damkianna



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Fear, Gen, Self-Acceptance, Self-Hatred, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 12:32:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damkianna/pseuds/Damkianna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The council does not find Yangchen until she is nearly sixteen anyway. Pre-canon: one way Yangchen might have been found, even when she tried to stay lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i do not ask for any crown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambyr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/gifts).



> For ambyr - I had a hell of a time picking a single prompt to work with, because all of them were amazing, and I would have written you ten stories had I but fingers enough and time. ♥ This ... may not be exactly what you were expecting as a Yangchen story, but I hope you enjoy it anyway!

  


The council does not find Yangchen until she is nearly sixteen anyway.

They say it to her like this when they explain what she is, one old woman speaking to her in the formal tongue of the high temples while the rest stand in a circle around her. To honor her, the old nun says as they bow; but to Yangchen all it says is that they have surrounded her, that they do not want her to get away.

The war is almost over, when they come. Yangchen has lived all her life on the cold north coast, far even from the nearest local temple, but she has heard the stories of the four high temples: how they use words that sound like wind to talk to the clouds themselves, how the monks and nuns have turned halfway to air and no longer need to eat or drink.

Yangchen does not know whether these things are true, but she does not have to. She knows one thing about them: that they have come only now— _now_ , far too late even if they did not come for her sake alone. She does not care about the rest.

When they tell her what they want from her, she laughs in their faces, laughs until her breath is gone and her eyes are wet. "I would rather die," she says to them, still laughing, and the great council of the high temples stares at her and does not seem to know what to say.

Except for the old nun, who bows again. "That is your choice," she says, gentle, and turns away. The rest of them still seem thrown, but they follow the woman when she goes, and leave Yangchen alone on the shore, laughing.

  


*

  


In the night, Yangchen moves, as she learnt to do from her parents. She has so very little to carry, so very little to arrange; this, at least, is easier done alone. And easier done with bending: Yangchen can fly upon the wind, cover so much more distance than she could if she were forced to walk.

She sleeps in the top of a tree, a poplar by a riverbank that sways all night in the wind off the north sea. She wakes when they come, listens to their steps in the grass as they form a circle round the trunk in the dim gray dawn, and she steps out of the tree and lands in a rush of wind before they are finished arranging themselves.

They say the same things again, as though she did not hear them yesterday. She looks away, deliberate, toward the sky. There are wings to the north, a silhouette against the sky—a pair of crane hawks, Yangchen thinks, soaring away toward the sea.

She watches the crane hawks until they are gone. The monks and nuns have fallen silent around her; three-quarters of them give up quickly, shaking their heads in sorrow, and the rest do not wait much longer before they follow.

The last to go is the old nun. The oldest of them, Yangchen thinks, to judge by the whiteness of her hair; her skin is weathered, wrinkled, and the tattoo that is so blue and sharp on the youngest of her fellows has faded a little. Yangchen has never seen anyone so old before.

Yangchen realizes her error the moment the old nun meets her eyes—something the old nun is only able to do because Yangchen has looked at her first. Clever old woman, Yangchen thinks, and patient; but cleverness and patience do not matter, cleverness and patience change nothing.

"I will not," Yangchen says, into the quiet of the morning.

"That is your choice," the old nun says, and bows, and walks away.

"How many times will you ask me?" Yangchen calls after her.

The old nun stops and turns, looking back at Yangchen with calm dark eyes. "That," she says, "is my choice."

It takes her a long time to walk out of sight, slow as she is.

  


*

  


The third time, there are fewer of them, and the fourth; the sixth time Yangchen refuses them, one of the other nuns drops to her knees in the grass and begins to weep tiredly into her hands. Yangchen meets the old nun's eyes and smiles, deliberate, over the sound of sobbing. Do you see, old nun? Do you see who it is that you are asking to do this thing?

"It is your sacred duty!" cries the weeping nun, grasping with her wet hands for the hems of Yangchen's skirts. "You _must_ , there is no other way—"

Yangchen has been angry for all her life, she sometimes thinks, but it blazes up now like a pyre, like the fires they built along the coast because there were too many bodies and not enough unfrozen ground. She kneels in a rush, grabs the nun by the chin; if her hands were as strong as her hatred, she thinks, she would crush the nun's skull like a beetle crab's shell. "I would first throw myself into the sea," she hisses, her jaw aching with the effort that it takes not to scream instead; the nun is staring at her blankly with those wet brown eyes, the eyes of a woman who has never killed anyone, has never wanted to—

"Then do it!" shouts a monk, grabbing at her arm, trying to make her loosen her grip. "Do it and set us free—"

"Enough," says the old nun.

The monk falls silent. He is looking at Yangchen, for one long still moment; and then he lowers his head and lets go of her arm.

The weeping nun blinks once, and then again, and then reaches up to touch Yangchen's hand where it is wrapped like iron around her chin—except Yangchen's grip is not so very much like iron anymore, and the nun pulls Yangchen's hand from her face and then holds it. Her fingers are very warm.

Yangchen stands up, pulls her hand free, and this time she is the one who walks away.

  


* * *

  


The seventh time, the old nun comes alone. Yangchen is sitting by the river in the afternoon, resting before she will continue following it south toward the mountains; the river is narrow here, fast and frothing. She watches the water flow north, north, like it would drag her back to the sea, and then a shadow falls across it.

"I will not," Yangchen says, without looking up. "I will not be your Avatar."

"You have said that," the old nun agrees. "You have said that you would rather die, that you would first throw yourself into the sea. And yet here you are."

Yangchen watches the water. "So you do not believe me."

The nun is silent for a moment, and then sits, slowly, on the ground beside Yangchen, folding up her old legs with care. "I believe that there are things you want more than you want to die. I think that is a good start."

Yangchen laughs without humor. "You are right," she says. "There are things I want more. I want to set the north coast on fire; I want the northern ice to sink into the sea; I want to watch the hordes of the Water Tribe drown slowly. There are many things I want."

Yangchen wants the old nun to be horrified—to turn away from the violence in Yangchen's heart, to be afraid, to hate her. The old nun does not oblige. "As I said," says the old nun, mildly. "A good start."

Yangchen clenches her fists. Nothing keeps her here; the old nun has closed her eyes, the better to tilt her face up into the weak, pale sunlight. Yangchen stands and turns away, leaps across the river with a gust of air.

The old nun does not move. "I will find you again," she says over the bubble and rush of water, eyes still closed. "But you may go now, if you like."

"I _may_ ," Yangchen says, incredulous.

The old nun cracks one eye open to peer across the river at Yangchen. "If you like," she repeats. "I will find you again."

Will she, Yangchen thinks.

  


*

  


She will.

It takes her longer, sometimes, if Yangchen makes an effort—of course the old nun can also Airbend, and she must, but Yangchen only ever sees her walking. She sets one narrow brown foot in front of the other and follows Yangchen into the mountains, and no matter how fast Yangchen goes, the old nun always, always catches up.

Yangchen nearly evades her once; she goes as quickly as she can for days and days, eating on the way as she leaps from rock to rock, and she thinks she has left the old nun behind. So Yangchen sits down to eat her supper, lets herself sleep late, and when she rises, well after the sun has risen, she looks into the distance. No one is there, she thinks, and the feeling that comes to her when she thinks it is not satisfaction, nothing she had expected: she feels hollow, thin, like a dry reed; like a dead thing, empty. Maybe the old nun has despaired of her at last; maybe the old nun is right to. Yangchen closes her eyes and then makes herself open them again, and blinks into the sun.

Below her, amid the endless rock and scrub, there is something moving: yellow robes, orange sleeves.

The anger, the irritation, the hatred—all these come rushing back, so thick and overwhelming that it is easy to pretend there is not woven among them a narrow, narrow thread of relief.

  


* * *

  


That night it is especially cold, and Yangchen wrestles with herself in the dark for a long time. She did not ask for the old nun to follow her into the mountains, and the old nun may turn back whenever she likes; Yangchen does not force her to lay her old bones down on the icy stone of the northern mountains. But the nuns and monks of the high temples carry so very little—it is an ancient rule, unspoken, that they be given what things they need and do not have. A rule Yangchen's own family once followed, for all the good it did them.

Yangchen tries never to think of them, because it hurts her and she hates it; she likes the anger better. But her aunties—how horrified they would be, Yangchen thinks. To think that she would let a nun of the high temples sleep on frozen ground, when Yangchen has two blankets and only one body—how Auntie Lo would scold her! How Auntie Tsang would wail at her selfishness!

Yangchen almost laughs, and then wants to throw herself off the mountain—but the old nun was right, there are still things she wants more than she wants to die. She has two blankets and only one body, and in her mind Auntie Tsang and Auntie Lo are looking at her mournfully and shaking their heads.

It takes Yangchen three long, long leaps to reach the outcropping where she last saw the old nun. In the dark, it is hard to search for her, and Yangchen is ready to give up when at last a lump of darkness beside a rock unfolds itself and says, "Ah, there you are."

As if she could ever have known Yangchen would come for her! Yangchen clenches her jaw and says nothing. She throws one blanket at the old nun and walks a little distance away, wraps the other around herself and closes her eyes. If the old nun says anything more, Yangchen chooses not to hear it.

  


*

  


"Wake up, Avatar," says the old nun.

The last thing Yangchen wants to do is what the old nun tells her to do, but the old nun traps her neatly: by the time Yangchen understands what she has said, Yangchen has already obeyed her.

"I will not be your Avatar," Yangchen says, angry all anew; and the old nun looks at her curiously.

"I think," says the old nun, "that there is something you do not understand."

" _I_ ," Yangchen says. "I have told you a dozen times that I will not, with the smallest words I know, and you think _I_ am the one who fails to understand."

"You are," says the old nun, placid. "You may run, if you like; you may kill, you may die. These things are your choice, as you know." She lifts her wrinkled hands, holds them open. "But no matter what you do, you _are_ the Avatar. That is not a choice, not a thing anyone may choose or unchoose."

Yangchen turns away, looks out over the mountain. "I suppose you would not lie about that," she says, scathing, because she does not want to answer with sincerity—does not know what there is that she could say, if she did. "If you could choose, after all, you would not have chosen me."

"It is the Avatar's task to care for all people," says the old nun, and bends down to pick up Yangchen's blanket, which she has neatly folded. "You do not seem wholly unsuited for it."

Yangchen wants fiercely to hit her, and as fiercely to get away, to never have those wide dark eyes on her again. The second impulse wins: Yangchen yanks the second blanket from her shoulders and turns to leap away, gathering wind around her like a shield—

"I will find you again," the old nun says, gently, and the air rushes out of Yangchen's grip like a loosed breath.

" _Why_ ," Yangchen shouts, " _why_ ," and she drops to her knees, her elbows, the stone beneath her cracking where she hits it; she closes her eyes, covers her head with her hands, and if the old nun touches her now Yangchen will rip her apart.

The old nun does not touch her.

The sound of rumbling stone dies away, the mountain settling again beneath Yangchen, and into the quiet that comes after, the old nun speaks at last. "Because you are needed," the old nun says. "Because you would give your blanket to an old woman you hate, in the dark, when no one is looking."

Yangchen does not open her eyes. "I am not what you need," she says, hoarse, little more than a whisper.

"You are all there is," says the old nun.

Yangchen is silent for a long time, but the old nun does not leave her; the old nun sits, folding up her legs, and together they rest on the mountainside.

  


*

  


Yangchen does not know how much time has passed, but the moment comes when it is time enough; she presses her hands flat against the ground and makes herself take a deep breath. "He was stronger than I was," Yangchen tells the old nun, turning her head at last and looking.

The old nun says nothing, only gazes at Yangchen with those wide dark eyes and waits.

"He was so much stronger," Yangchen says. She sits up, tilts her head back and looks at the sky. It looks flat today, hard, everywhere the same even gray, like there never was a sun and never will be again. "I tried—I tried so hard, I tried everything I could think of, but I had never—" She has sped up, her voice getting louder; she stops and makes herself swallow, starts again more evenly. "Airbending can move fire, it can push water and earth. I thought that was what I was doing, I thought it was the same thing. But he knew better, and he was stronger. He held them there and he filled them with water, it was—" Bubbling out their mouths, their noses, creeping in deeper every time they had tried to breathe—to breathe, to scream, struggling frantically, but in the end the only screaming had been Yangchen's own. The water had already been filling their throats; they had not made a sound. "I could not get it out."

She _had_ tried, she had tried everything—tried to yank the water back out, tried to force air in past it. But it had not worked—nothing had, not quickly enough to help them; they are rotting somewhere at the bottom of the north sea, and Yangchen is alone.

Except now there is the old nun. "The Northern Water Tribe trains its warriors well," she says, without inflection.

Yangchen laughs; it sounds unpleasant even to her. "Not well enough," she says. "I crushed him, burned him, sucked the air from his lungs, and I was not even sorry. When I was finished with him, when I laughed over his body, all they wanted to know was whether I could do it again; and I knew in that moment what I was. For all that they would slaughter each other, the kings of the north coast and the war chiefs of the Water Tribe are cut of the same stone, and I swore before them both I would never bend like that again. And I will not, but not because I am kind; not because it would be wrong. Because I am also cut from that same stone—because if I began again, I am not sure that I would stop." She shakes her head, helplessly, willing the old nun to understand. "You see?" she pleads. "You see? I am not what I should be."

The old nun is silent for a long time. She comes nearer, one small step at a time, as though she is in no hurry at all; and when she sits down by Yangchen's side and lays one light hand upon Yangchen's shoulder, Yangchen does nothing.

"There is a thing we learn in the temple," the old nun says, very quiet, "when we are children. The spring breeze is the spirit of air; but so is the great mountain storm. The heart of a woman who gives away a blanket out of kindness and kills a man out of hatred is the heart of a woman who knows both of these faces."

Yangchen makes a noise in her throat, despairing and angry at once; has the old nun listened to a single word Yangchen has said? She does not understand anything, if all she wishes to do is turn Yangchen into a piece of poetry. Yangchen twists away from the old nun's hand, thinking she will run—and for the first time, the old nun does not let her: the old nun grasps Yangchen's chin, her cheek, holds her there with sudden strength.

"What is it you believe the Avatar is called to do? Sit in a garden of flowers, listen to the laughter of children, receive the praises of the innocent? You have seen the heart of war, you have touched what is terrible in this world and come away stained: that is what it is, to hold suffering in your hands. _That_ is the Avatar's duty. You think your pain and your anger have ruined you, that your spirit is salted earth—but those who call to the Avatar most are not people wealthy in contentment. Who will understand them better than you? You know them all: you know the tears of the wounded child, the half-buried rage of the conquered—even the cruel satisfaction of the conqueror." The old nun gazes at Yangchen a moment longer, grip still tight upon Yangchen's face; and then all at once she lets go, steps away. "You know them, and you are the Avatar; you have power to equal the war chiefs of the north, the kings of the south, and you tell me you have discovered in yourself the will to use it. What, then, will you use it for? _This_ is the thing you must choose."

They stare at each other on the cold hard side of the mountain, Yangchen and the old nun; and then the old nun turns away. She sits down on the ground, slow with age: she folds up her legs and presses her fists together. Yangchen watches her white hair move with the mountain wind. A spring breeze; a mountain storm. Two faces.

It is three steps from where Yangchen kneels to where the old nun is seated. It feels to Yangchen like it takes a long time to walk them. She sits down by the old nun, carefully folds up her legs, presses her fists together. The anger is still there, the grief and the hatred; but maybe that does not matter. Maybe Yangchen can still make a choice.

  


* * *

  


(Yangchen will go to the high temples, one day. She will end a dozen wars, avert two dozen more; people will call her a great peace-maker, will praise her for her compassion and her kindness, her ability to look into the face of violence without flinching.

Some of them will ask her how she does it, and she will tell them: it is easy. When she sits across the table from a warlord, a general, a conqueror-king, she looks at them and sees two faces, and one of those faces is her own. She will tell them: I, too, am a conqueror-king; it is only that I chose a different kingdom. It is only that my kingdom is peace.)

  


**Author's Note:**

>   
>  _I do not ask for any crown_  
>  _but that which all may win;_  
>  _nor seek to conquer any world_  
>  _except the one within._  
>     
> —Louisa May Alcott


End file.
